Weekends in ParadelleBeyond the Lord of the Flies
I was writing on another blog a post about how writers encounter and even invite rejection when they share their work with publishers. I think poets have more opportunities than writers in other genres because they can constantly send out a poem or a few poems to multiple publishers.
The writing of that post crossed over with an audiobook rereading of a novel that is in the literary canon and is often taught in high school, which had faced many rejections before being published.
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was a novel I read in high school. It was not assigned reading (too controversial?), but I could tell that it was a book I should know since I planned to major in English. I thought it was great. It held up on rereading. It might have even been better now that I’m older and the world seems at least as much, if not more, like that island.
Golding sent out his manuscript and had it rejected 21 times. At the publisher Faber and Faber, it was initially marked for rejection, and the reader (not an editor, of course) assigned to it labeled it “absurd,” “dull,” and “pointless.” By chance, a young editor at the firm named Charles Monteith, needing something to read on the train, grabbed it off the rejected pile and realized it had potential.
It tells the story of a group of preadolescent boys stranded on a desert island after their plane is shot down while evacuating them from Britain during a fictional war.
It is an allegorical tale, and this micro-society of children rather quickly devolves into violence. Since 1954, the novel has shaped our understanding of human nature. We have a latent darkness within, and the destructive or creative capacity of collective will.
I didn’t know until I started researching the novel that this was Golding’s take on an 1857 children’s novel titled Coral Island. That is an adventure tale about three extremely pious shipwrecked boys. But Golding had come to believe after his time serving in the British Navy in World War II that everyone had the potential for evil inside them, and he wanted that to be the main conflict of his story.
His original manuscript was titled Strangers From Within. The revised title is much better. That manuscript went through many revisions. It had more detail on the war, the evacuation, and how the boys became stranded. Editor Monteith agreed with the earlier reader that it was kind of dull. It also had prominent religious themes that didn’t make it into the final draft.
The final manuscript is a secular book that goes right to the action of two of the main characters meeting on the beach after the crash. That revised version went on to be a high school reading list staple, and a classic that was never intended to be a “young adult” novel.
Born in Cornwall, England, William Golding started writing at the age of seven. Though he studied natural sciences at Oxford to please his parents, he also studied English and published his first book, a collection of poems, before finishing college. He served in the Royal Navy during World War II, participating in the Normandy invasion.
After Lord of the Flies, William Golding built a remarkably ambitious and decorated career, publishing a dozen more works of fiction. He won the Booker Prize (1980) for Rites of Passage, the Nobel Prize in Literature (1983), and was knighted in 1988.
His later novels deepened his lifelong exploration of human nature, often through allegory, psychological intensity, and historical settings. After the explosive success of Lord of the Flies, Golding refused to repeat himself. Instead, he produced a series of challenging, often unsettling novels.
Rites of Passage is the first in the “To the Ends of the Earth” trilogy. It is set aboard a ship sailing to Australia in the early 19th century. Narrated by Edmund Talbot, a young aristocrat whose journal reveals his naïveté and class prejudice. Golding critiques British imperialism and social hierarchy. He followed this with Close Quarters and Fire Down Below in the trilogy.
The Inheritors (1955) is a radically experimental novel told from the perspective of Neanderthals and explores innocence and the rise of violence.
Pincher Martin (1956) is a psychological survival narrative that becomes metaphysical.
Free Fall (1959) is a philosophical, semi-existential novel about free will and moral responsibility.
The Spire (1964) is a feverish allegory about obsession and spiritual delusion, often considered one of his masterpieces.
#humanNature #LordOfTheFlies #novels #WilliamGolding
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